10 ms·

Cameras Came to the Newsroom

126 points by tysone 7y ago

philwelch 7y ago
I've always assumed that everything associated with a workplace was under surveillance. I'm not sure why anybody would be surprised or upset about security cameras. A bizarrely lukewarm take from the NYT here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- libertine 7y ago
  I guess the question is: is it for security or for monitoring? If it's the second, that's ilegal in a lot of countries.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Banks don’t have security cameras for monitoring the tellers in other countries?
    - libertine 7y ago
      They have security cameras to protect people and the bank assets - not do monitor the work of their employees. At least in Europe that's the law. Besides that, you must have visible warning signs to let people know there are cameras recording them, and you also have to notify the national entity that's responsible for data protection that you will have "X" cameras (image, audio, or both) for the "Y" purpose.
      - garmaine 7y ago
        I’m not sure how that is any different from the OP.
  - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
    What's the difference?
    - libertine 7y ago
      The difference is: - For security reasons: to protect people and assets; - For monitoring: to control your employees activity. Picking a ridiculous example: if your boss tells you that you're spending too much time talking/doing a task/eating, because he as been watching you via security cameras, he will be in a lot of trouble.
  - paganel 7y ago
    The article implies that the cameras were installed against terrorists. Some people are pretty happy to throw their privacy away in this illusory fight against terrorism. Needless to say, the terrorists have already won, we’re slowly giving up everything that separates us from them.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Needless to say, the terrorists have already won, we’re slowly giving up everything that separates us from them. I’m against using vague threats like terrorism to increase surveillance, but the two are not equivalent.
    - jameslevy 7y ago
      Unfortunately there is a good reason to believe that organizations like NYT could be targets. This should not be compared to, say, the Patriot Act.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  Bizarre that we would be regulating where people spend a significant fraction of their time? That's only a "bizarrely lukewarm take" in the US, few other places have this everything goes mentality.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor. But maybe that's exactly it: journalists who work in an office are used to thinking of themselves as being of a fundamentally higher social class than factory workers.
    - pmoriarty 7y ago
      "Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor." The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once. I'm reminded of the famous office scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil: [1] and also of the Panopticon[2], which was just a Romantic fantasy of Jeremy Bentham's when he dreamed it up in the 1790's, but which has become reality in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the advent of supermax prisons, schools, factories, and offices, with their omnipresent surveillance. Bentham described the panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". It's depressing and frightening that there are still many advocates of such oppression. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu1iND6vtcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu1iND6vtcE [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
      - philwelch 7y ago
        > The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once. And nobody ever watches all of the security camera footage.
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    Spending a significant fraction of our lives at work is also ironic: in a free, democratic country like the U.S., you're in an autocratic micro-regime most of the time¹. ¹ Granted, that you're free to replace with another or try to start your own!
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I've always assumed that everything associated with a workplace was under surveillance. If that workplace is a prison or sweatshop, yes. If it's a place people with dignity work, then that shouldn't be the case, and for the most part of history, it wasn't.
dontbenebby 7y ago
This seems like a security issue in addition to a privacy issue. If these cameras are hacked, now you can watch someone entering their passwords, working on stories pre-release, communicating with sources, etc. This makes the CCTV system a very juicy target.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Security is a trade-off in everything. Someone can hack the laptops too, does that mean laptops should be avoided?
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Given laptops are interacted with directly, a compromise is more likely to be noticed and prevention more likely to be in place.
lostmymind66 7y ago
When I was younger, I had a boss that had security cameras around our small office. When he was at home (which was half the week), he would watch us through the cameras. These cameras also had two-way audio, so I would be having a conversation with my co-worker and he would butt into the conversation..through the camera. I only lasted about 3 months before I quit. There is still an active, private, Facebook group with ex-employees of this company. The boss was so horrible..it's almost like people needed a support group.
- Theodores 7y ago
  Same but different tyrant-boss but no two way audio. We didn't have gigabit broadband back then, therefore whenever the boss was on the cameras the internet went slow. Therefore we always knew that if the internet was slow we had to be on best behaviour. We never told him how we knew when he was watching or let him know that we knew, it was an office wide open secret amongst us though. Funny times. The off topic highlight was when a young French girl was being interviewed. I happened to be in earshot and I almost fainted. Straight up she was asked about her plans to start a family. They didn't want to hire someone who might cost them maternity pay down the line, hence the opening question that brazenly got straight into the sexism. She took the job. I too only lasted three months before I quit.
  - JudgeWapner 7y ago
    you should have hacked the camera drivers, a-la Speed, to show the same footage of people diligently staring at screens with their hands neatly placed on the home row.
  - pstch 7y ago
    > Straight up she was asked about her plans to start a family. They didn't want to hire someone who might cost them maternity pay down the line In France, you can lie to that question without legal repercussions, even when currently pregnant, and refusing to hire someone for the reason you stated (and a long list of other reasons) would be illegal. Does this kind of thing exist in the US, even if only in some states ?
- 7y ago
geofft 7y ago
I think not uproaring is a very rational response to the threat model: - You already have little expectation of privacy at work. Your computer has a sysadmin account for the company, and probably not a sysadmin account for you. Your Springsteen tickets are logged and potentially cached in the printer's memory. At most places, coworkers can see what you're doing in person. So there's no strong reason to expect more crackdown on occasional personal use of work time/resources than there has been in the past. - There are easy options (especially for people who get an NYT salary) for private work and private computing: doing things at home, using your cell phone (not on the corporate network, no corporate login, and probably too small to see on the cameras), taking a quick break to a nearby cafe, printing your tickets at FedEx, etc. (Many of those are much more anonymous than possible at work, e.g., leave your phone at your desk, email to printandgo@fedex.com from a throwaway account, and pay in coins.) - The stated rationale—responding to violent attacks—makes sense, is quite worthwhile individually in expectation (even a slight reduction in your chance of getting killed is quite valuable), and if believed implies insufficient staffing to effect a panopticon. There's probably just one security guard downstairs, at most. - There's other personally beneficial reasons to want cameras at work, e.g., helping you (whichever side you find yourself on!) in harassment claims. In particular I'd actively want low-resolution cameras, enough to identify people but not enough to read standard-sized text on paper or screen, covering every office or conference room with a door that closes. My own workplace has cameras everywhere other than the bathrooms. We're told this at orientation, and also told that nobody is actively watching them. This seems totally fine to me. If there were security cameras in the bathrooms / privacy rooms / etc., or in my apartment, or in hotel rooms, or anything else, that would be quite different.
- Noumenon72 7y ago
  Waiting at the auto repair shop today, a woman came in asking to speak to the manager because she believed the shop had removed the tires from her rental car and replaced them with different rims. The manager was able to appeal to the fact that there were security cameras directly watching the bay to get her to file a police report instead. I talked to my mechanic later, a young black man. He said another customer once accused him of stealing the emblem off his BMW, and the cameras cleared him. Cameras really can protect employees who do a good job.
nullc 7y ago
All people considering leaking evidence of unlawful behavior by powerful entities like governments should take note: The New York times is much more risky an outlet than it used to be. If someone wants to find the source of a leak published at the NYT they probably only need to hack or seize the DVRs recording those cameras.
- geofft 7y ago
  Do the tapes persist forever? I'd assume they only keep it for a couple of days at most. For the stated reason, incident response, you may not even need recordings at all, just a real-time view. I also assume the NYT doesn't meet with sources in their offices (in full sight of everyone from the summer intern to the person restocking the fridge, all of whom you could try to bribe), and instead meets in a crowded public location like a cafe.
- untog 7y ago
  The article mentioned that the video is kept locally and not stored anywhere in the cloud, so if you want to hack it you're going to need physical access to the building. And if you have that then NYT has a whole lot of other problems it should be dealing with before worrying about the cameras. (besides, I very much doubt many people leak to the NYT by walking into the office and announcing their presence. They do it online or send things in by mail in the stories I've read)
  - casefields 7y ago
    The point is the government can force the NY Times to hand it over. And they will. First amendment protection for sources applies to the journalists but not so much third party data.
    - untog 7y ago
      I'm still not sure exactly what they'd be handing over that would be of note. Confidential sources surely wouldn't meet with journalists in the office, it would be a crazy risk to have them walk through the front door and keep them in view of the entire newsroom.
Causality1 7y ago
I'd much rather have a security camera over my desk than a manager's head hanging over my shoulder. Yes, there's a privacy tradeoff, but for me personally it would be worth it to cut down on workplace drama. No more he-said she-said fights that end in both people being terminated. No more false accusations of sexual harassment or racism, and a lot fewer genuine instances of both. I'm especially in favor of them if the footage is archived and only viewed if there's a specific need to, as opposed to being available live.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Do those things happen to you a lot? None of them have ever happened to me. The security should match the risk; I'll keep going without a camera, but perhaps you could simply have your own camera recording yourself all day, if you need this protection.
  - Causality1 7y ago
    Not to me, but they have to coworkers. We have a lot of seasonal low-wage workers whose lives are...interesting. There was a non-fatal shooting in the parking lot several years back between a woman and her ex-boyfriend.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  How about neither?
kartan 7y ago
UK: " https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/surveillance-the-legal-issues-of-cctv-use-at-work/ https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/surveillance-the-legal-iss... - If an employer wishes to use CCTV in the workplace, the ICO must be notified as to why they intend to use it. This is part of the registration process for a data controller under the DPA. An employer cannot then use the information collected for any other reason. For example, if the organisation is using CCTV to monitor crime, it cannot then use it to monitor staff. Employers should, before using surveillance cameras, carry out an impact assessment, decide if alternatives are possible and only go ahead if the use of cameras meets a legitimate aim. - Staff must be informed that they may be recorded and where cameras are located. To make this undisputable the employer should use clear and visible signs. - Levels of CCTV surveillance in work must be proportionate to the reasonable expectation of privacy. In certain areas with a higher level of expected privacy, such as near toilets, changing rooms, kitchen and break areas, it is unlikely to be acceptable to have cameras. Maintaining integrity in these areas is essential. Employers need to be aware that staff can request to see the recordings kept of them by making a subject access request, and the data must be provided no longer than 40 days after a request is received. " It seems that the UK law is reasonable. (At least for a country that has a high level of surveillance)
- arethuza 7y ago
  A few years back my employer took over a floor of offices that had previously been occupied by a small financial services company - they had installed loads of very obvious cameras in the ceilings. Although I was pretty sure they weren't connected to anything I went around and disconnected all of the cables going into the cameras just to make sure!
- marcoperaza 7y ago
  >An employer cannot then use the information collected for any other reason. For example, if the organisation is using CCTV to monitor crime, it cannot then use it to monitor staff. >Employers need to be aware that staff can request to see the recordings kept of them by making a subject access request The second kind of undermines the interest sought to be protected by the first. I can imagine nefarious reasons for wanting to see the same frames of footage that you happen to be in. What function does this access serve anyway?
firefoxd 7y ago
In the name of security, Big Blue decided to add keycards to go through every single door. It's understandable. They first added the card readers over the span of months, getting people used to them even if they weren't functional. Then they added the turnstile at the entrance. It's a good idea to allow only authenticated people into your building. What they didn't take into account was the number of people that go in and out of the building every single day. Imagine a 12 story building with at least a hundred people on each floor on the average day. And they had to be funnelled through a single turnstile. Then there is the elevators. One morning, everything was activated at once. The line backed all the way outside the building and wrapped around. You could spend up to twenty minutes to get into the building. Then once you are in, you have to wait for the elevators. You have to scan your keycard to get to your floor. Now try doing that with 30 people in the elevator and they all want to go to a different floor. "Can you press 11 for me?" They couldn't, because their card only works for the third floor. In less than a week they shut everything down and went back to the designing board. They had to rebuild the reception to add 4 turnstile. The elevators keycard readers were never reactivated again. I started taking stairs and never looked back.
- praneshp 7y ago
  Maybe the secret plan was healthier employees lol.
- icebraining 7y ago
  In the buildings I've seen with that kind of security, the elevator lobby on each floor was unsecured, and then you had a door to the secure area. Of course, during high-traffic hours people just hold the door for each other, defeating the purpose.
  - phantom784 7y ago
    That's better for security as well. Elevators with keycards have to have overrides for firefighters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBERTNSuZR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBERTNSuZR8 is an interesting talk on the subject.
craigsmansion 7y ago
So, nothing a spray can with black paint couldn't have fixed, but let's blog about it instead.
- jrockway 7y ago
  Destroying office equipment seems like a good way to become unemployed. Not everything has to be absolutes; before burning the building down, you could just ask "hey, what's with the cameras".
  - craigsmansion 7y ago
    Normally I'd agree, and there are plenty of work sites where cameras can work in the employees' favour, but for a journalist of a large respectable newspaper? At the very least they would have had something to write about, because this article is lukewarm at best and feels like a complainy blog post. Also, getting fired at a news paper for blacking out the cameras in the vicinity of your desk as a protest because a new security chief wants to feel important is probably a blessing in disguise.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  The pen is mightier than the can.
legalreasons99 7y ago
Cameras were installed at a previous company where I worked. This was just an office - there was nothing to see anyone doing other than sitting at desks and walking between desks. The management told the staff they were only going to be on after working hours, to catch thieves. I noticed a week or two later that some young, male, technical members of staff, including the one who did the installation, were in the server room watching staff on the monitors, laughing at people’s appearances and talking about the sexual acts they would like to perform with some of those visible on the monitor. I reported this to management, who said they’d fix it. A week later, the same was happening. Again I reported, again it carried on. Then I saw that (male) management were using the web viewer from their desks to watch the women in the office (selecting particular views) from the comfort of their desks with monitors towards the windows. Which are reflective, so they weren’t as private as they perhaps thought. I told one of the women concerned. She complained to the same management - they told her they were off during work hours (which they weren’t) and nothing happened. I kept spotting them sitting watching the staff from their cosy corners, so I logged into the system (it wasn’t hard to find the credentials) and reconfigured it so it wouldn’t appear on the network any more. It took them a few days to factory reset the box and they were off again. I left shortly afterwards - the general attitude towards employees being one of my main reasons.
- kyberias 7y ago
  That is absolutely horrible. What country was this? Isn't that illegal?
posbehsf 7y ago
Isn’t anything you do on a company issued machine or network monitored as is? I think the question is not whether or not your activity is monitored but whether or not you work for an employer who cares that you occasionally browse Facebook, in which case the problem is your employer and not the fact that you’re activity is monitored.
ggm 7y ago
People are right to focus on the downsides, but I do want to intrude one consideration: Newsrooms have already been the target of attack. There are people out there with skills and weapons, who view journalists as "the target". Maybe one day, the security camera footage will be materially useful?
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Specifically to desensitize people. “Look! Cameras are ok. Everyone should stop worrying.”
Consultant32452 7y ago
This smells an awful lot like classism to me, and so do a lot of the comments. It's gross that people would be okay with and even supportive of monitoring poor/blue collar work environments but suddenly educated wealthy people are being treated the same as poor people and it's a big problem.
noodlesUK 7y ago
The part of this that worries me is that journalists will often have embargoed, confidential (classified?) information open on their monitors from time to time. Obviously this doesn’t matter in the part of the newsroom that reviews restaurants, but imagine this at the Guardian or Washington Post during the snowden leaks etc. It’s much easier to seize a DVR containing videos of all the secret communications than to get a source some other way... I hope most news outlets that deal with truly sensitive data have something akin to SCIFs, but you never know what pops up in someone’s cubicle...
jeffrallen 7y ago
If you work from home you decide how many cameras are in your workplace. Just sayin'

126 points by tysone 7y ago

I've always assumed that everything associated with a workplace was under surveillance. I'm not sure why anybody would be surprised or upset about security cameras. A bizarrely lukewarm take from the NYT here.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
libertine 7y ago
I guess the question is: is it for security or for monitoring? If it's the second, that's ilegal in a lot of countries.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Banks don’t have security cameras for monitoring the tellers in other countries?
  - libertine 7y ago
    They have security cameras to protect people and the bank assets - not do monitor the work of their employees. At least in Europe that's the law. Besides that, you must have visible warning signs to let people know there are cameras recording them, and you also have to notify the national entity that's responsible for data protection that you will have "X" cameras (image, audio, or both) for the "Y" purpose.
    - garmaine 7y ago
      I’m not sure how that is any different from the OP.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
  What's the difference?
  - libertine 7y ago
    The difference is: - For security reasons: to protect people and assets; - For monitoring: to control your employees activity. Picking a ridiculous example: if your boss tells you that you're spending too much time talking/doing a task/eating, because he as been watching you via security cameras, he will be in a lot of trouble.
- paganel 7y ago
  The article implies that the cameras were installed against terrorists. Some people are pretty happy to throw their privacy away in this illusory fight against terrorism. Needless to say, the terrorists have already won, we’re slowly giving up everything that separates us from them.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Needless to say, the terrorists have already won, we’re slowly giving up everything that separates us from them. I’m against using vague threats like terrorism to increase surveillance, but the two are not equivalent.
  - jameslevy 7y ago
    Unfortunately there is a good reason to believe that organizations like NYT could be targets. This should not be compared to, say, the Patriot Act.
stefan_ 7y ago
Bizarre that we would be regulating where people spend a significant fraction of their time? That's only a "bizarrely lukewarm take" in the US, few other places have this everything goes mentality.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor. But maybe that's exactly it: journalists who work in an office are used to thinking of themselves as being of a fundamentally higher social class than factory workers.
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    "Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor." The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once. I'm reminded of the famous office scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil: [1] and also of the Panopticon[2], which was just a Romantic fantasy of Jeremy Bentham's when he dreamed it up in the 1790's, but which has become reality in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the advent of supermax prisons, schools, factories, and offices, with their omnipresent surveillance. Bentham described the panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". It's depressing and frightening that there are still many advocates of such oppression. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu1iND6vtcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu1iND6vtcE [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
    - philwelch 7y ago
      > The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once. And nobody ever watches all of the security camera footage.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  Spending a significant fraction of our lives at work is also ironic: in a free, democratic country like the U.S., you're in an autocratic micro-regime most of the time¹. ¹ Granted, that you're free to replace with another or try to start your own!
coldtea 7y ago
>I've always assumed that everything associated with a workplace was under surveillance. If that workplace is a prison or sweatshop, yes. If it's a place people with dignity work, then that shouldn't be the case, and for the most part of history, it wasn't.

dontbenebby 7y ago

This seems like a security issue in addition to a privacy issue. If these cameras are hacked, now you can watch someone entering their passwords, working on stories pre-release, communicating with sources, etc. This makes the CCTV system a very juicy target.

manigandham 7y ago
Security is a trade-off in everything. Someone can hack the laptops too, does that mean laptops should be avoided?
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Given laptops are interacted with directly, a compromise is more likely to be noticed and prevention more likely to be in place.

lostmymind66 7y ago

When I was younger, I had a boss that had security cameras around our small office. When he was at home (which was half the week), he would watch us through the cameras. These cameras also had two-way audio, so I would be having a conversation with my co-worker and he would butt into the conversation..through the camera. I only lasted about 3 months before I quit. There is still an active, private, Facebook group with ex-employees of this company. The boss was so horrible..it's almost like people needed a support group.

Theodores 7y ago
Same but different tyrant-boss but no two way audio. We didn't have gigabit broadband back then, therefore whenever the boss was on the cameras the internet went slow. Therefore we always knew that if the internet was slow we had to be on best behaviour. We never told him how we knew when he was watching or let him know that we knew, it was an office wide open secret amongst us though. Funny times. The off topic highlight was when a young French girl was being interviewed. I happened to be in earshot and I almost fainted. Straight up she was asked about her plans to start a family. They didn't want to hire someone who might cost them maternity pay down the line, hence the opening question that brazenly got straight into the sexism. She took the job. I too only lasted three months before I quit.
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  you should have hacked the camera drivers, a-la Speed, to show the same footage of people diligently staring at screens with their hands neatly placed on the home row.
- pstch 7y ago
  > Straight up she was asked about her plans to start a family. They didn't want to hire someone who might cost them maternity pay down the line In France, you can lie to that question without legal repercussions, even when currently pregnant, and refusing to hire someone for the reason you stated (and a long list of other reasons) would be illegal. Does this kind of thing exist in the US, even if only in some states ?
7y ago

geofft 7y ago

I think not uproaring is a very rational response to the threat model: - You already have little expectation of privacy at work. Your computer has a sysadmin account for the company, and probably not a sysadmin account for you. Your Springsteen tickets are logged and potentially cached in the printer's memory. At most places, coworkers can see what you're doing in person. So there's no strong reason to expect more crackdown on occasional personal use of work time/resources than there has been in the past. - There are easy options (especially for people who get an NYT salary) for private work and private computing: doing things at home, using your cell phone (not on the corporate network, no corporate login, and probably too small to see on the cameras), taking a quick break to a nearby cafe, printing your tickets at FedEx, etc. (Many of those are much more anonymous than possible at work, e.g., leave your phone at your desk, email to printandgo@fedex.com from a throwaway account, and pay in coins.) - The stated rationale—responding to violent attacks—makes sense, is quite worthwhile individually in expectation (even a slight reduction in your chance of getting killed is quite valuable), and if believed implies insufficient staffing to effect a panopticon. There's probably just one security guard downstairs, at most. - There's other personally beneficial reasons to want cameras at work, e.g., helping you (whichever side you find yourself on!) in harassment claims. In particular I'd actively want low-resolution cameras, enough to identify people but not enough to read standard-sized text on paper or screen, covering every office or conference room with a door that closes. My own workplace has cameras everywhere other than the bathrooms. We're told this at orientation, and also told that nobody is actively watching them. This seems totally fine to me. If there were security cameras in the bathrooms / privacy rooms / etc., or in my apartment, or in hotel rooms, or anything else, that would be quite different.

Noumenon72 7y ago
Waiting at the auto repair shop today, a woman came in asking to speak to the manager because she believed the shop had removed the tires from her rental car and replaced them with different rims. The manager was able to appeal to the fact that there were security cameras directly watching the bay to get her to file a police report instead. I talked to my mechanic later, a young black man. He said another customer once accused him of stealing the emblem off his BMW, and the cameras cleared him. Cameras really can protect employees who do a good job.

nullc 7y ago

All people considering leaking evidence of unlawful behavior by powerful entities like governments should take note: The New York times is much more risky an outlet than it used to be. If someone wants to find the source of a leak published at the NYT they probably only need to hack or seize the DVRs recording those cameras.

geofft 7y ago
Do the tapes persist forever? I'd assume they only keep it for a couple of days at most. For the stated reason, incident response, you may not even need recordings at all, just a real-time view. I also assume the NYT doesn't meet with sources in their offices (in full sight of everyone from the summer intern to the person restocking the fridge, all of whom you could try to bribe), and instead meets in a crowded public location like a cafe.
untog 7y ago
The article mentioned that the video is kept locally and not stored anywhere in the cloud, so if you want to hack it you're going to need physical access to the building. And if you have that then NYT has a whole lot of other problems it should be dealing with before worrying about the cameras. (besides, I very much doubt many people leak to the NYT by walking into the office and announcing their presence. They do it online or send things in by mail in the stories I've read)
- casefields 7y ago
  The point is the government can force the NY Times to hand it over. And they will. First amendment protection for sources applies to the journalists but not so much third party data.
  - untog 7y ago
    I'm still not sure exactly what they'd be handing over that would be of note. Confidential sources surely wouldn't meet with journalists in the office, it would be a crazy risk to have them walk through the front door and keep them in view of the entire newsroom.

Causality1 7y ago

I'd much rather have a security camera over my desk than a manager's head hanging over my shoulder. Yes, there's a privacy tradeoff, but for me personally it would be worth it to cut down on workplace drama. No more he-said she-said fights that end in both people being terminated. No more false accusations of sexual harassment or racism, and a lot fewer genuine instances of both. I'm especially in favor of them if the footage is archived and only viewed if there's a specific need to, as opposed to being available live.

EliRivers 7y ago
Do those things happen to you a lot? None of them have ever happened to me. The security should match the risk; I'll keep going without a camera, but perhaps you could simply have your own camera recording yourself all day, if you need this protection.
- Causality1 7y ago
  Not to me, but they have to coworkers. We have a lot of seasonal low-wage workers whose lives are...interesting. There was a non-fatal shooting in the parking lot several years back between a woman and her ex-boyfriend.
dredmorbius 7y ago
How about neither?

kartan 7y ago

UK: " https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/surveillance-the-legal-issues-of-cctv-use-at-work/ https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/surveillance-the-legal-iss... - If an employer wishes to use CCTV in the workplace, the ICO must be notified as to why they intend to use it. This is part of the registration process for a data controller under the DPA. An employer cannot then use the information collected for any other reason. For example, if the organisation is using CCTV to monitor crime, it cannot then use it to monitor staff. Employers should, before using surveillance cameras, carry out an impact assessment, decide if alternatives are possible and only go ahead if the use of cameras meets a legitimate aim. - Staff must be informed that they may be recorded and where cameras are located. To make this undisputable the employer should use clear and visible signs. - Levels of CCTV surveillance in work must be proportionate to the reasonable expectation of privacy. In certain areas with a higher level of expected privacy, such as near toilets, changing rooms, kitchen and break areas, it is unlikely to be acceptable to have cameras. Maintaining integrity in these areas is essential. Employers need to be aware that staff can request to see the recordings kept of them by making a subject access request, and the data must be provided no longer than 40 days after a request is received. " It seems that the UK law is reasonable. (At least for a country that has a high level of surveillance)

arethuza 7y ago
A few years back my employer took over a floor of offices that had previously been occupied by a small financial services company - they had installed loads of very obvious cameras in the ceilings. Although I was pretty sure they weren't connected to anything I went around and disconnected all of the cables going into the cameras just to make sure!
marcoperaza 7y ago
>An employer cannot then use the information collected for any other reason. For example, if the organisation is using CCTV to monitor crime, it cannot then use it to monitor staff. >Employers need to be aware that staff can request to see the recordings kept of them by making a subject access request The second kind of undermines the interest sought to be protected by the first. I can imagine nefarious reasons for wanting to see the same frames of footage that you happen to be in. What function does this access serve anyway?

firefoxd 7y ago

In the name of security, Big Blue decided to add keycards to go through every single door. It's understandable. They first added the card readers over the span of months, getting people used to them even if they weren't functional. Then they added the turnstile at the entrance. It's a good idea to allow only authenticated people into your building. What they didn't take into account was the number of people that go in and out of the building every single day. Imagine a 12 story building with at least a hundred people on each floor on the average day. And they had to be funnelled through a single turnstile. Then there is the elevators. One morning, everything was activated at once. The line backed all the way outside the building and wrapped around. You could spend up to twenty minutes to get into the building. Then once you are in, you have to wait for the elevators. You have to scan your keycard to get to your floor. Now try doing that with 30 people in the elevator and they all want to go to a different floor. "Can you press 11 for me?" They couldn't, because their card only works for the third floor. In less than a week they shut everything down and went back to the designing board. They had to rebuild the reception to add 4 turnstile. The elevators keycard readers were never reactivated again. I started taking stairs and never looked back.

praneshp 7y ago
Maybe the secret plan was healthier employees lol.
icebraining 7y ago
In the buildings I've seen with that kind of security, the elevator lobby on each floor was unsecured, and then you had a door to the secure area. Of course, during high-traffic hours people just hold the door for each other, defeating the purpose.
- phantom784 7y ago
  That's better for security as well. Elevators with keycards have to have overrides for firefighters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBERTNSuZR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBERTNSuZR8 is an interesting talk on the subject.

craigsmansion 7y ago

So, nothing a spray can with black paint couldn't have fixed, but let's blog about it instead.

jrockway 7y ago
Destroying office equipment seems like a good way to become unemployed. Not everything has to be absolutes; before burning the building down, you could just ask "hey, what's with the cameras".
- craigsmansion 7y ago
  Normally I'd agree, and there are plenty of work sites where cameras can work in the employees' favour, but for a journalist of a large respectable newspaper? At the very least they would have had something to write about, because this article is lukewarm at best and feels like a complainy blog post. Also, getting fired at a news paper for blacking out the cameras in the vicinity of your desk as a protest because a new security chief wants to feel important is probably a blessing in disguise.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
The pen is mightier than the can.

legalreasons99 7y ago

Cameras were installed at a previous company where I worked. This was just an office - there was nothing to see anyone doing other than sitting at desks and walking between desks. The management told the staff they were only going to be on after working hours, to catch thieves. I noticed a week or two later that some young, male, technical members of staff, including the one who did the installation, were in the server room watching staff on the monitors, laughing at people’s appearances and talking about the sexual acts they would like to perform with some of those visible on the monitor. I reported this to management, who said they’d fix it. A week later, the same was happening. Again I reported, again it carried on. Then I saw that (male) management were using the web viewer from their desks to watch the women in the office (selecting particular views) from the comfort of their desks with monitors towards the windows. Which are reflective, so they weren’t as private as they perhaps thought. I told one of the women concerned. She complained to the same management - they told her they were off during work hours (which they weren’t) and nothing happened. I kept spotting them sitting watching the staff from their cosy corners, so I logged into the system (it wasn’t hard to find the credentials) and reconfigured it so it wouldn’t appear on the network any more. It took them a few days to factory reset the box and they were off again. I left shortly afterwards - the general attitude towards employees being one of my main reasons.

kyberias 7y ago
That is absolutely horrible. What country was this? Isn't that illegal?

posbehsf 7y ago

Isn’t anything you do on a company issued machine or network monitored as is? I think the question is not whether or not your activity is monitored but whether or not you work for an employer who cares that you occasionally browse Facebook, in which case the problem is your employer and not the fact that you’re activity is monitored.

ggm 7y ago

People are right to focus on the downsides, but I do want to intrude one consideration: Newsrooms have already been the target of attack. There are people out there with skills and weapons, who view journalists as "the target". Maybe one day, the security camera footage will be materially useful?

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

Specifically to desensitize people. “Look! Cameras are ok. Everyone should stop worrying.”

Consultant32452 7y ago

This smells an awful lot like classism to me, and so do a lot of the comments. It's gross that people would be okay with and even supportive of monitoring poor/blue collar work environments but suddenly educated wealthy people are being treated the same as poor people and it's a big problem.

noodlesUK 7y ago

The part of this that worries me is that journalists will often have embargoed, confidential (classified?) information open on their monitors from time to time. Obviously this doesn’t matter in the part of the newsroom that reviews restaurants, but imagine this at the Guardian or Washington Post during the snowden leaks etc. It’s much easier to seize a DVR containing videos of all the secret communications than to get a source some other way... I hope most news outlets that deal with truly sensitive data have something akin to SCIFs, but you never know what pops up in someone’s cubicle...

jeffrallen 7y ago

If you work from home you decide how many cameras are in your workplace. Just sayin'